liz wrote:I can't go to sleep without everything coming in at night. I stressed about the horses being out but they are in the back yard and connected to the deck. Indy puts his head over the deck rail when he thinks it is time for a goody.

You mean the horses have no shelter whatsoever? I thought you had a barn on your property...

Here they have a barn built to withstand almost anything. Rachel moved her horses back home before Irma. Where they are boarded they only have a roof for sun protection. It will not protect them from a storm.

Indy is the same as a very big dog. He comes to me for ear scratches and to see if I have an oatmeal cookie. The pen is attached to my back deck so Indy can beg for goodies like a dog. He knows when it is 3 pm and the dogs are getting oatmeal cookies.

No. The neighbors turned us in for not having 2 acres per horse. She has had to board them in another county but they do not have a strong shed for them. We have a barn that will withstand almost anything so I told her to bring them home for protection against the hurricane. They were here for 4 days but she had to take them back where they are boarded before the neighbor turned us in again.

Ah, yes, nasty neighbors are a pest, aren't they? When I first moved to this house, it was October and I never opened the window of the parrot room until the weather turned warm and that's when the old lady next door started complaining about me talking and singing too early in the morning and the birds making too much noise. She called the police 5 times, the SPCA with a hoarding complaint and Animal Control. The Animal Control guy became a friend, the SPCA officer called them and gave them a piece of his mind for making him waste his time with lies [they had said that there were hundreds of birds all over the house, that I was an old lady who lived by myself and couldn't keep up, etc] and, when the officers that came the fifth time she called found out that they had called them four times before as well as the SPCA and Animal Control, they went back and told her to stop calling for no good reason. She died a few months ago - she must have been in her 90s...

I thought you had 5 acres... or is it that you have more than 2 horses?

Two acres per horsee seems like a lot. The working horses in the city certainly never had that much. I doubt my sisters horses had that much. It's almost like how a cage that's big enough for one budgie is probably big enough for 2. They need room to move and run, but that's not simply multiplied by the number of horses. It's not linear.

Arbitrary things like that are useless. The breeder from which we seized all the birds had many of them in enclosures large enough to make even a Swedish judge happy. It didn't mean the birds were well cared for. We have a goffins who seems to be happier and less neurotic the smaller his cage is. Doing what's best for the bird becomes impossible when people who know nothing about the particular animal try to write laws to regulate how you care for it.

I've been in Orlando since Saturday evening but I fed them dinner before I left even though it was a little early and everything was fine. I talked to my husband yesterday and early this morning and he tells me that Sweetpea has not said a single word and that Mami hasn't made a peep which bothers me something terrible because these two birds will not shut up when I am there! Sweetpea talks all the time and Mami sings and sings and sings all morning long and talks in the evening... I need to get away for a few days every few years because, although I love all my animals, working hard every single day doing the same exact thing with no weekends, no holidays, no days off can be quite stressful but my joy of being away lasts exactly 24 hours - after that, all I do is worry about the birds!

Flying back tonight so tomorrow it will be a 'regular' day for the birds! My husband said that Mami started talking again although Sweetpea hasn't and that Isis was a bit grumpy until he made a special effort to pay attention to her but that there was no mollifying Zoey no matter what he did! Oh, he also said that Paquita was the one that gave him more trouble than anybody else because he could hardly clean her cage she was so insisting in biting him